We were raided!

Readers living in Oz may have seen on the news last night or read on the front page this morning that a major police operation, Taskforce Argos, raided a whole lot of homes yesterday for child porn. Including ours! I have to say, having five police officers tramping up the stairs of your home at 6am, declaring, "Police! This is a raid! Everyone to the lounge room!" is rather a rude awakening. The boy went downstairs to answer the doorbell, and had just pulled on boxer shorts and then was directed to sit in the lounge, so had to sit there shivering until he was allowed to get some more clothes. As I heard them yelling at him that they were the police, I thought, "Goddammit! I'm never sharing a house with people who do drugs ever again!" Little did I know what the warrant was really for... When an officer knocked on my bedroom door and told me to get up, I asked if I could put some clothes on first. He said okay, but then proceeded to stand there, watching and waiting for me to get out of bed. After several seconds of stare-off, I said, "I'm totally naked, can you close the door please?!" "Ooooooh," he responded, finally shutting the door and giving me some privacy. Pervert!

Once all housemates were in the lounge, they proceeded to tell us they were here because they had a warrant to search for child porn. We could NOT believe it - once we knew the allegations, things became extremely surreal. They took us off one at a time to scan through all of the images on our computers with their software. As they took people away, the rest of us would wait in the lounge, being babysat by the most junior officer. He turned out to be a nice enough guy, asking questions about what we study, and looking around and asking about the posters on our walls. We needed to be escorted to the bathroom, though - no wandering around the house or contacting anyone while they were doing the search. It turned out that they're software only worked on one of our computers, and they had to seize the rest of them (that's 6 computers) to be analysed at the forensics lab. They were here in the morning for about two and a half hours.

We all wandered around the house in a weird limbo, not quite knowing what to do for a while. It was such a strange feeling - they obviously couldn't have gotten a warrant to raid our house if they didn't have some fairly solid evidence. This then raised the scary realisation for each of us: Wow, maybe one of my housemates is going to be arrested this afternoon, for possessing child porn. There was nothing accusatory about the thought, and I'm quite sure that none of us ever got to wondering, "Oooooh, who could it be?", but it did raise interesting discussions around how well you ever really know someone, no matter how close you feel you are to them. Everyone has their little secrets, and jesus, if your secret is that you get off on kiddy porn, you're not exactly going to be spreading that around, are you?

The good news is, a few hours later the police brought all of our computers back, and told us that they had checked them and hadn't found anything. They did give us quite a stern warning, though, about ensuring our router is secure, and being careful as to what friends we let use our internet. It was a huge relief - hooray, none of my housemates are in jail! At least, not yet...